The Khronos Group - a non-profit industry consortium to develop, publish and promote open standard, royalty-free media authoring and acceleration standards for desktop and handheld devices, combined with conformance qualification programs for platform and device interoperability.

OpenCL related stories

Students learn with interactive and hands-on sessions about GPU hardware, GPU languages, discovering how best to take advantage of GPUs for their computational needs. The course covers programming in both OpenCL and CUDA, pointing out the similarities and differences along the way. Topics include both the core languages and extensions including those for double precision and interfacing with OpenGL 3D graphics buffers.

OpenCL Studio combines OpenCL and OpenGL into a single integrated development environment for high performance computing. The feature rich editor, interactive scripting language and extensible plug-in architecture support the rapid development of complex parallel algorithms and accompanying visualization. The first production version of OpenCL Studio including instructional videos and demo applications are available online.

ConceivablyTech posted a good review of the WebGL 1.0 Spec release news and followed it up with their own speculation on WebCL. "Enabled in a browser, WebCL could open an entirely new world for cloud applications at much higher performance levels. Khronos mentioned image and video processing as well as advanced physics for web games that could come alive through WebCL."

Khronos has announced a quick reference card for WebGL 1.0 release spec. This adds to the collection of Reference Cards already available for other Khronos APIs: OpenGL, OpenCL, OpenVG, OpenMAX, OpenSL ES, COLLADA and OpenWF

AMD announced at GDC 2011 a technology demonstration of a Bullet Physics plug-in for Autodesk® Maya® 2011 software. The new plug-in is based on OpenCL industry standards and the open-source Bullet Physics Engine. AMD's Bullet Physics plug-in for Autodesk Maya 2011 is designed to enable game developers and 3D artists to access Maya's creative workflow capabilities to create interactive cloth simulations on a greater range of workstations and PCs, including those based on ATI FirePro professional graphics cards and AMD CPUs, and to remove technology limitations that can restrict developers' ability to create stunning games and computer-generated (CG) graphics.

Please visit Khronos at booth #1444 at the Game Developer Conference (GDC), March 2-4, 2011 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to learn more about COLLADA. Khronos is also running a series of developer university sessions on Thursday, March 3rd, in Room 301 in the South Hall:

WebGL at 9AM

OpenGL at 10:30AM

Demos at 12 noon

COLLADA at 1:30PM

OpenCL at 3PM

Beer and demos at 4:30PM and finally Mobile APIs at 4:50PM.

More details about Khronos activities at GDC can be found on our GDC Event page.

LuxMark is a OpenCL benchmark tool. The idea for the program was conceived in 2009 by Jromang. It was intended as a promotional tool for LuxRender. The idea was quite simple, wrap SLG inside an easy to use graphical user interface and use it as a benchmark for OpenCL. After Anandtech adoption of SLG as OpenCL benchmark, the code was finally written and is now available at http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/LuxMark

The Khronos Group invites you to attend GDC 2011, and visit The Khronos Group booth #1444. We will have lots of great news on WebGL, COLLADA and many of our other API's, and to pick up a free laminated reference card for many of our APIs!

AMD offers a new Optimization case study. Examining key kernels utilized in a Quadratic Programming solver to optimize the evaluation of the Radial Basis Function SVM, results in improving performance by a factor of 5 compared to naive code running on an AMD Radeon™ HD 5870 GPU. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are a widely used binary classification technique used to label data as belonging to one of two categories.